Clothing Designers

 Room 2 have had a go at designing clothing for warm climates out of newspaper. It has been an activity at Reading time which has led to some very big tidy-up times. Here are a few items from the collection. We have looked at traditional clothing and discussed how the weather impacts on traditional clothing.

We had some questions about why some countries are hot and some are not. Fergus has brought along his globe to explain how it works. Thanks Fergus.

Printed People

 

Room 2 making our printed people with classroom objects and white paint on black paper.

We wrote poems about ourselves and used our prints to illustrate them.

Here they are...

 

2D and 3D Shapes

We have been exploring 2D and 3D shapes this term. We have learnt about the differences between 2D and 3D shapes and have learnt about the language of these shapes.

Ask us how many sides and corners a 2D shape has and to count the faces on a 3D shape.

We have been loving making 3D shapes, some people have shown a great deal of persistence and creativity to build 3D shapes with as many faces as possible. Clever kids!

Room 2 Measuring Fun

We have been doing lots of measuring in Room 2. We use centimetres on our rulers to measure lengths and widths.

Photos of Room 2 using string to measure curved objects and then lining the string up along the rulers. 

Tiddywinks practise.

 

After our practise we had a class competition. We used chalk to write on the carpet and measured our jumps. We can teach this game to our families for 'Home Learning' soon. Tyne and William P got the biggest jumps. Some of our jumps backfired and we got negative centimetre measurements. It was fun to talk about negative numbers. Andrew is our negative number expert. Great work Room 2.

Calendar Art

Here is a slideshow to give you the general idea of what the calendar art looks like. Order forms have gone home in reading packets, there are more in the classroom if you need them. Orders are to go to the box in the office. You can still order the calendars next term (there is a date on the bottom of the form but this has been extended so don't panic if you haven't ordered by the end of Term 3).

Classifying Animals

We have been learning about classifying animals. First we have to sort animals into two big groups, vertebrates (with a backbone) and invertebrates (without). The pictures below are the groups we sorted them into. We migth change our minds the more we learn. We learnt that animals without a backbone have the protection on the outside of their body from a shell or hard case (exoskeleton).

We have been sorting vertebrates and learnt how to classify animals into fish, bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian. Test us out at home- we are really good at working out tricky ones like bats and whales.

  This video was a real favourite in Room 2. Everyone wanted it on the blog so here it is.

Glow Worms

We had a visit from Miriam (Flora's Aunty) she is a scientist who stuides a protein in the glow worm which makes it glow. She showed us lots of pictures of glow worms and explained their lifecycle. It was fasinating and made us all appreciate the wonder and beauty of glow worms.

We also found out the glow worms are hiding around Ross Creek. If you feel like a family adventure click here for the directions. We watched this video about the glow worms in Britain and wrote our own report style response to what we had learnt. We are learning to pass on information to the people who read our writing by ordering our ideas, including details and ending our report by telling people about how we feel about or connect to our report topic. Here are some of our reports, you can read the rest on our writing frames in the classroom.

The video we watched about British glow worms.


The cave has glow worms on the roof. The glow worms have a light on its bottom. The light attracts flies for its breakfast. The glow worm has a big mouth. It’s a good fly eating mouth. I like the light. Ryan

 A glow worm came to school. Glow worms catch insects with fishing ropes. The glow worm can catch an ant in two seconds. It fools the ant into its home on worm fishing rods. The glow worm is special because no one is allowed to touch it.
Joe

 The life cycle goes around in a circle. On their bottom they have a light that glows. Mummy glow worms lay eggs. I love glow worms.
Shahad

 The egg will hatch into a glow worm and it will turn into a grown up. The life cycle will go round and around. Sometimes glow worms eat other glow worms. Grown up glow worms have no mouth so they live for three days. Glow worms are awesome and I love glow worms.
 Andrew

Glow worms are beautiful because they have lights. The eggs hatch, glow worms make slimy fishing lines to catch insects. When it is an adult it stays for three days, then it will die. I love the light, it glows in the dark.
 Leena

The glow worm has a yellow light on its bottom. It lives in dark caves. The worm is special to me because it turns into a dragonfly type insect.
 Hira

The glow worm glows. The glow worm is special to me because it is pretty and it lights up the dark. Angelique

A glow worm has a light on its tail. It eats other glow worms. The glow worm is special to me because it is shiny in the dark caves. It is like a lightbulb.
Jake

The glow worm eats other insects. It turns into a grown-up. They look cute but they only live for three days.
William G

Honey Bees Life Cycle

The Old Log of Wood

 

Sorry this isn't the best photo. We had a lovely (quick) visit with the log of wood. Mrs Walker had to give the best phototaking spot to the official photographer. We will have a copy of that photo soon. 

Squid

Room 2 have had an outrageous visitor in our class last week. We had a squid in our 'Topic/Science' area at Reading time in our class all week. We observed the squid carefully and made scientific drawings of the squid.

We learnt quite a lot about squid on Youtube. We watched these videos and on Friday we went up to the top court and measured out the giant squid that was found by a Japanese Science team. Mrs Walker drew the outline of a squid once we had measured out the length.




The squid was really big. Some people in Room 2 had apparently always wanted to see a squid eye. Well they got to have a really long look at one and one lucky person got to be a squid eye.

Tuhi has been busy

Tuhi has been visiting lots of people. Here are some pictures and stories about what he has been up to. Click on the comics to make them full screen.

Rolling the Dice

Last week we started testing dice in our class. We wanted to know which number gets rolled the most. We have been learning about the language around probability, possible and impossible, likely and unlike, certain and definate.
With our maths partners we rolled a dice and used tally marks to record how often we rolled each number.

William P thought 3 would be the most rolled because he always gets threes when he plays snakes and ladders.

Sophie thought 6 would get the most rolls because it was on the dice. Lots of people agreed that 6 comes up a lot.

 

We had eleven different groups all testing the dice and different numbers were the winners for different groups. We talked about why...

Oliver said that he wanted four to win and sort of could roll it so four came up a lot. He liked trying to do it but he also said it is kind of cheating. Lots of groups agreed that they could make the dice land on a number sometimes but they couldn't every time. We all decided it wasn't a fair test to try to make the dice land on numbers but it was fun. 

We talked about chance. There was no chance of rolling numbers that were not on the dice. There are six numbers on the dice and you could roll any of those six numbers. We talked about 1 in 6 chance of rolling your favourite number. That each number has the same chance because there is one of each. William and Andrew said it was like fractions, you have 1/6 of a chance. In probability we say you have 1 in 6 chance of rolling each number on the dice.

 This week we changed the dice. Mrs Walker changed the 6 on our big classroom dice to a 1. We predicted that we would not roll any 6s. We were right.

We thought 1 would win because it had more chance but we kept rolling 4s. Oliver discovered that the dice had a funny corner and we noticed that it kept rolling to a four because of this. It was great to learn about fair testing but sort of ruined the point of Mrs Walker probability lesson. Next week we will change 4 to a 1 as well and see what happens.



It was great to hear about all the happy coin tossing completed at home last week. Next week we will change the odds and use two coins.

Mrs Walker Gets a Break

There have been a lot of children enjoying playing school before school starts. I'm not really sure if they have me quite right when they act out the teacher but some people wanted to have a real go on the teacher's chair.

Chartlotte C spent lots of time preparing a book to read to the class last term and lots of people have done the same and had a go since. William P taught us all how to make some Geogami. Zadyn is reading to us everyday to share his new learning from Reading Recovery with us.

It is lovely to have a class who want to share their enthusiasm for learning with their friends. Keep it up Room 2.

Bird Art

It has taken a while but our 'Bird Art' based on our walks to Ross Creek last term is finally hanging in our classroom.

We collected lots of natural objects, mostly leaves and moss, to create our bird bodies using PVA glue and some coloured paper pieces. We tried to lay our collage pieces in the same direction as we observed birds feathers to be when we sketched different birds we saw on our walks.

We used some coloured feathers, plastic eyes and some images of bird feet. We learnt about how different birds have different feet for different ways they use them. We used bird feet designed for gripping to tree branches.

Then we made the backgrounds for our birds. We made it a blurred bush a bit like some of our Ross Creek photos. One of the green paints smelt very strongly of eggs, you will see some talented one-handed painting. This left us free to hold our nose with the other hand.

Luckily it didn't smell once it had dried. You can view our finished work in our classroom.